The study responds to a long-standing paradox in early childhood education. Although the visual arts are widely celebrated for fostering creativity and self-expression, they are frequently enacted in product-focused ways, with little attention paid to the thinking developed through the process. When art is positioned as decorative or as an end point, its capacity to support inquiry, dialogue, and sustained thought is obscured. Prior research has also shown that teachers, particularly those new to inquiry approaches, can struggle to know when and how to integrate the arts meaningfully, a difficulty often compounded by limited confidence rooted in their own experiences of art education. The new framework is designed to give educators a conceptual language for recognising artistic processes as genuine epistemic activity rather than filler activities or display material.

The evidence base was built in two phases. Phase One involved a nationwide qualitative questionnaire sent to all 2,139 early childhood settings registered on the national database of education settings, comprising seven open-ended questions about pedagogical influences, practices, benefits, and challenges of inquiry-based approaches; sixty-three settings responded. From those expressing interest, six settings were purposively selected for Phase Two to provide variation in service type, geography, size, age groupings, cultural demographics, and philosophy. Thirty-eight teachers and leaders participated, alongside children aged six months to six years, who took part through naturally occurring inquiries. Researchers spent roughly a week at each site, gathering group interviews, field notes, photographs, video recordings, observations, and pedagogical documentation, including children’s visual representations.

Methodologically, the study adopted a qualitative, interpretivist design guided by narrative inquiry and informed by sociocultural and bioecological theories of learning. Kaupapa Māori theory shaped the research praxis, emphasising whakawhanaungatanga, the ongoing enactment of relational accountability, and ako, a reciprocal ethic in which teaching and learning are shared, dialogic processes. Analysis was iterative and dialogic: researchers reviewed site data individually, then brought interpretations to regular online wānanga for collective discussion and refinement, re-storying episodes of practice and comparing interpretations across sources. Emerging accounts were checked with participating teachers, who were also invited to write their own narratives of the inquiries, strengthening their position as research partners. The framework itself was developed after the formal conclusion of the wider project through a further cross-site analysis, with successive versions refined by the team and checked against the data.

Theoretically, the framework weaves together Dewey’s experiential learning, Vygotsky’s sociocultural account of mediated thought, Māori onto-epistemologies, and the Reggio Emilia tradition associated with Loris Malaguzzi. Within this synthesis, the visual arts function as languages through which children externalise, test, and refine ideas. Vea Vecchi’s description of art-making as poetic thinking is central: sensory experience is integral to knowledge construction, and drawing, painting, sculpting, and constructing act as cultural tools that mediate cognition. Because visual representations are tangible artefacts, they render thinking visible and available for shared interpretation, allowing ideas to be revisited, contested, and extended over time. In co-constructivist classrooms, these artefacts become shared cognitive resources; as researcher Margaret Brooks has argued, drawing allows knowledge to exist in a shared state before being assimilated into new perspectives.

Materials themselves are treated as active participants in inquiry rather than neutral instruments. Building on work by Sylvia Kind, the study describes children’s encounters with clay, wood, charcoal, or acorns as vibrant social-ecological assemblages in which humans and non-humans are in constant relation. For infants and toddlers, whose investigations are primarily sensorimotor, this matters enormously: their inquiry may centre not on symbolic representation but on discovering what materials can do, their affordances, resistances, and transformations. Neuroscience supports this picture, showing that embodied encounters with materials activate attentional and feedback systems that sustain curiosity. The bicultural context adds further depth, with Māori concepts such as āta, deliberate care and attentiveness, and whanaungatanga, relationships of connection and reciprocal responsibility, framing material exploration as an ethical, place-responsive practice aligned with the national curriculum, Te Whāriki.

The resulting framework is deliberately not linear. It identifies recurring, interconnected processes through which children and teachers move as ideas, materials, and relationships evolve, and it is articulated in two age-responsive versions. For infants and toddlers, the processes are ignite, explore, revisit, and re-ignite, emphasising embodied engagement and meaning made through repetition. For young children, two further processes, plan and consolidate, are added, reflecting growing capacities for anticipation, representation, and collaboration. Crucially, the authors stress that this is not a simplified version of inquiry for the youngest learners but a challenge to assumptions about their capabilities, foregrounding their capacity to think with materials, peers, and adults in sustained cycles of sense-making.

Vignettes from the participating centres illustrate each process vividly. Ignition is captured in an infant-toddler inquiry where, following children’s fascination with painted rocks found in the neighbourhood, teachers introduced mosaic as a shared art form; toddlers gathered fragments, arranged them, applied grout, and the finished tile was placed near the entrance for families, making visible the Te Whāriki strand of contribution. Exploration appears in a toddler inquiry centred on acorns collected beneath an oak tree, where children compared sizes, sorted baby and mummy acorns, and later drew them, with marks, gestures, sounds, and narratives intertwining as movement became twirly whirly or rolling away to see the world. Revisiting is exemplified by children who, after discovering a mystery garden, theorised about a caretaker they named Nature Man, returning repeatedly to drawings and conversations until a shared narrative, papier-mâché figures, and eventually a book and theme song emerged, each return transforming earlier thinking rather than merely repeating it.

Planning and consolidation are shown to be equally material. In one kindergarten, children drew their ideas of what a taniwha, the guardian being of a local pūrākau, might look like; when construction moved to the carpentry area, the square and rectangular wood available forced them to adapt curved designs, demonstrating how planning unfolds through interaction between imagination and material conditions. Consolidation was embodied in a textile artwork inspired by tīvaevae, Cook Islands appliqué quilts, made at the conclusion of an inquiry into community and belonging. Early responses to the question of what community is included not sure and watering the plants; after months of shared making, children offered answers such as everyone together and looking after people, changes the authors read as evidence of collectively consolidated meaning, publicly displayed to families and the wider community.

The discussion repositions the visual arts as a generative space in which thinking is slowed down, made visible, and opened to reinterpretation. Materials produced moments of cognitive tension that one scholar terms cognitive knots, launching points for further investigation, while the pedagogical conditions that sustained inquiry included protected time, collegial dialogue, attentive listening, documentation that kept ideas in circulation, and deliberate re-offering of materials. The authors acknowledge the study’s grounding in a small number of New Zealand settings and offer the framework as a flexible conceptual resource requiring critical adaptation to local cultural and curriculum contexts rather than a universal model. Even so, the message is pointed: positioning the arts at the centre of inquiry means rethinking how knowledge itself is constructed, shared, and sustained, treating young children as capable participants whose ideas can be made visible, revisited, and taken seriously within a learning community.

Subject of Research: How visual arts and material exploration support inquiry-based learning and children's thinking in early childhood education.

Article Title: Thinking Through Making: Supporting Children’s Inquiry Through Visual Arts in Early Childhood Education

Article References: Thinking Through Making: Supporting Children’s Inquiry Through Visual Arts in Early Childhood Education. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02341-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02341-2

Keywords: early childhood education, visual arts, inquiry-based learning, Thinking Through Visual Inquiry, Te Whāriki, Kaupapa Māori, working theories, multimodal representation, pedagogical documentation, Reggio Emilia, materials, teacher pedagogy

The study, conducted by Naji Kortam and Soheer Nabil-Hanna of the Biology Education Department at the Academic Arab College for Education in Haifa, was designed as a single-site interpretive qualitative case study. The researchers worked with a kindergarten class of 35 children, from whom 20 focal participants were selected for closer observation. Over the course of a researcher-facilitated, inquiry-oriented learning-garden unit, the team gathered data through semi-structured group interviews and through both participant and non-participant observations conducted before, during, and after the unit. This triangulated approach allowed them to track not just what children said about plants, but how their talk and actions changed as the garden unit unfolded.

The analytical engine of the study was inductive, interpretive qualitative content analysis, focused on three interlocking dimensions: plant-related sensemaking, inquiry practices, and curiosity episodes. Rather than testing a predefined hypothesis, the researchers let patterns emerge from the data, coding children’s explanations, questions, predictions, and moments of wonder as they appeared in transcripts and field notes. This methodological choice matters, because curiosity research in early childhood has long suffered from a definitional problem. As earlier work by Jirout and Klahr famously noted, children’s scientific curiosity has been an elusive concept in search of an operational definition. By watching curiosity happen in real time, in a real garden, Kortam and Nabil-Hanna offer one of the most concrete answers yet.

The findings are striking in their specificity. As the garden unit progressed, the children’s explanations of how plants live and grow became measurably more sophisticated. Early in the unit, explanations tended to be generic and vague. By the end, children were grounding their accounts in specific growth conditions: soil, air, heat, and season. A child who might once have said simply that plants need water could now articulate that a seedling in shaded soil grows differently from one in full sun, or that seasonal temperature changes affect what the garden can produce. This shift from generic to evidence-referenced reasoning is exactly the kind of conceptual development that early science educators hope to see, and it emerged not from formal instruction but from sustained, hands-on engagement with living things.

Equally important, the study documented how genuine inquiry practices became visible in children’s everyday talk and action. The researchers identified four signature behaviors: making predictions about what would happen in the garden, asking child-initiated why and how questions, comparing outcomes across different conditions, and taking simple measurements. These are not trivial accomplishments for five-year-olds. Prediction requires holding a mental model and committing to its consequences. Comparison requires recognizing that conditions can be varied deliberately. Measurement, even in its simplest forms, introduces the idea that claims about the world can be quantified. The garden, in other words, functioned as an authentic laboratory where the core epistemic practices of science arose naturally from the task of keeping plants alive.

Curiosity itself, the study’s central construct, showed up in three observable forms. Children displayed overt wonder, moments of visible surprise and delight at what the garden revealed. They sustained their engagement with uncertainty, returning repeatedly to questions they could not immediately answer rather than abandoning them. And they connected their garden experiences to prior experiences and to information resources, drawing on family gardening, books, and conversations to make sense of what they observed. This tripartite picture gives researchers and teachers something they have lacked: a practical rubric for recognizing curiosity when it happens, rather than merely assuming it exists because children seem engaged.

The study’s design principles may prove to be its most immediately useful contribution. Kortam and Nabil-Hanna distilled their findings into three design principles for inquiry-oriented kindergarten science. First, planned contrasts across conditions: children should encounter plants growing in deliberately different circumstances, such as sun versus shade or watered versus dry soil, because contrast makes causal variables perceptible. Second, repeated revisits over time: because plants change slowly, children need multiple encounters with the same garden across days and weeks, allowing their predictions to be tested against unfolding evidence. Third, open-ended questioning supported by simple tools: adults should ask questions that invite exploration rather than recall, and children should have access to simple instruments such as rulers and magnifiers that extend their senses. None of these principles requires expensive equipment or specialist training, which makes them genuinely scalable.

The theoretical stakes of the work extend beyond the kindergarten fence. Curiosity has become a hot topic in cognitive science, with recent reviews in outlets such as Nature Reviews Psychology cataloguing how curiosity drives learning across ages and contexts. But most of that literature studies curiosity in controlled settings, far from the messy environments where children actually live. This study flips the perspective, asking not how curiosity can be measured in the lab but how it is enacted in the wild of everyday classroom activity. The answer, it turns out, is that curiosity is deeply social and deeply situated. It depends on talk with peers and adults, on materials that invite manipulation, and on questions that remain genuinely open rather than leading to predetermined answers.

The choice of a learning garden as the research site is also significant within a growing international movement. Garden-based learning has attracted increasing research attention, with studies examining everything from teacher roles in kindergarten foraging activities to the connections between risky nature play and science learning in Australian bush kinders. What this new study adds is a fine-grained account of the cognitive and epistemic work happening beneath the surface of garden activity. Where earlier research often emphasized affective and social benefits, such as connection to nature and well-being, Kortam and Nabil-Hanna demonstrate that a garden can be a site of rigorous scientific sensemaking, provided it is organized as structured small-group inquiry rather than free play alone.

For educators and policymakers, the message is both encouraging and demanding. Encouraging, because the study shows that the foundations of scientific literacy, evidence-based explanation, prediction, comparison, and measurement, can be built in ordinary kindergartens with nothing more exotic than seeds, soil, and thoughtful adult questioning. Demanding, because those outcomes did not appear spontaneously. They required deliberate design: contrasts planned into the garden layout, schedules that allowed revisiting, and facilitators skilled at keeping questions open. Curiosity, the study suggests, is not a fixed trait that some children bring to school and others lack. It is a practice that environments either nourish or starve. In a sunlit patch of ground in an Israeli kindergarten, twenty children showed what nourished curiosity looks like: wonder in their eyes, evidence in their explanations, and questions that kept pulling them back to the garden day after day.

Subject of Research: How five- to six-year-old children enact scientific curiosity, inquiry, and plant-related sensemaking in a kindergarten learning garden.

Article Title: Enacting Scientific Curiosity in a Kindergarten Learning Garden: Children’s Inquiry, Talk, and Plant Sensemaking

Article References: Enacting Scientific Curiosity in a Kindergarten Learning Garden: Children’s Inquiry, Talk, and Plant Sensemaking. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02348-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02348-9

Keywords: scientific curiosity, kindergarten science, learning garden, early childhood education, inquiry-based learning, plant sensemaking, garden-based learning, science education, qualitative case study, children's inquiry, preschool learning, wonder and exploration

A recently published longitudinal study, carried out by a team at The Education University of Hong Kong, sheds critical light on this issue. Spearheaded by Dr. Chan Wang, Dr. Weipeng Yang, and Dr. Alfredo Bautista, the research investigates the lived experiences of female preschool teachers of diverse ethnicities—namely Filipino, Pakistani, and Hong Kong Chinese—within Hong Kong’s densely urbanized educational settings. Their findings, disseminated through the ECNU Review of Education in May 2025, offer keen insights into the socio-cultural and organizational impediments that hinder these educators’ effective incorporation of STEM methodologies.

At the crux of their investigation lies the application of the Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM), a robust analytical framework designed to assess the adoption and concerns of educators when integrating new practices. Over a six-week period, the team implemented a professional development program tailored to enhance STEM teaching competencies among the participants. Data collection methods encompassed in-depth interviews, multifaceted surveys, and reflective worksheets, allowing for both qualitative and quantitative assessment of the teachers’ evolving perspectives and challenges encountered during the program.

One of the study’s pivotal revelations centers around the pervasive effect of gender stereotypes and ethnic minority biases that subtly erode the confidence of female teachers in adopting STEM subjects. Despite their participation in targeted professional development, many educators reported persistent feelings of self-doubt, often compounded by cultural expectations that circumscribe women’s roles in society and, by extension, in science-related pedagogies. This phenomenon aligns with broader psychological theories on stereotype threat, whereby individuals internalize negative stereotypes that subsequently impair their performance and engagement.

Parallel to the gendered dimension is the profound influence of deeply ingrained cultural values, notably those stemming from Confucian traditions prevalent in Chinese society. The study elucidates how these cultural frameworks prioritize teacher-directed instruction and academic rigor, often encouraging rote memorization and deference over experiential learning and inquiry—which are cornerstones of effective STEM education. Consequently, educators faced an inherent conflict between the prescribed curricular content and the pedagogical approaches most conducive to fostering STEM literacy through hands-on exploration.

The research also identifies a significant gap in the availability and adaptability of STEM teaching resources that resonate with Hong Kong’s unique socio-cultural milieu. Many instructional materials, including videos and textbooks, originate from Western educational contexts, rendering them less pertinent or accessible for teachers operating within a distinctly different linguistic, cultural, and pedagogical environment. This mismatch not only complicates lesson planning but also detracts from the authenticity and engagement potential of STEM initiatives within local classrooms.

Further compounding these challenges are systemic constraints inherent to the structure of Hong Kong’s preschool education landscape. The curriculum’s rigidity, coupled with spatial limitations endemic to urban schools, restricts opportunities for interactive STEM activities. Such constraints reflect broader urban planning realities, where limited classroom space and high student-to-teacher ratios delimit the scope of hands-on experiments and collaborative learning that are vital for STEM engagement.

Moreover, the study underscores the high-stakes performance pressures exerted by parents and educational institutions, which often prioritize traditional academic achievement and primary school readiness over exploratory learning processes. This emphasis on measurable outcomes and standardized assessments diminishes institutional support for innovative STEM pedagogies, placing further strain on educators striving to balance curricular demands with progressive teaching methods.

Importantly, the researchers argue that these entrenched challenges transcend individual shortcomings, revealing a complex web of sociocultural and organizational factors that collectively shape the climate in which female, ethnically diverse preschool teachers operate. Their confidence, efficacy, and instructional choices emerge not merely from personal capabilities but from the intertwined influences of cultural identity, gender dynamics, and institutional constraints.

Given this intricate context, the study compellingly advocates for the development of professional development programs that are not only technically robust but also culturally responsive and contextually grounded. Tailored support mechanisms must acknowledge and integrate the unique experiences of female teachers from ethnic minorities, facilitating pedagogical adaptations that honor both cultural legacies and the demands of contemporary STEM education.

In addition to training, the provision of localized teaching resources that reflect Hong Kong’s multicultural environment and educational priorities is imperative. Partnerships between curriculum developers, educators, and community stakeholders could catalyze the creation of instructional materials that resonate authentically with students and teachers alike, thereby augmenting engagement and efficacy.

The urgency of such interventions is accentuated by Hong Kong’s strategic goal to strengthen STEM competencies at all educational levels. Recognizing that early childhood education forms the foundation for sustained academic and career trajectories in STEM fields, empowering educators in this sector is vital for fostering long-term inclusivity and diversity within science and technology disciplines.

Wang and colleagues emphasize that a “one-size-fits-all” approach to STEM education is fundamentally untenable, particularly in culturally heterogeneous urban settings such as Hong Kong. Instead, an adaptive, empathetic pedagogy that respects contextual nuances and supports teachers holistically offers the most promising pathway to sustainable reform.

Beyond pedagogical implications, this research contributes to critical debates on educational equity and the intersectionality of identity in professional contexts. By illuminating the unique challenges faced by female, ethnically diverse educators, the study encourages policymakers and institutions to re-examine structural barriers and craft inclusive policies that valorize diversity as a strength rather than a hurdle in STEM education.

As the world grapples with the imperative to nurture future generations equipped with scientific literacy and innovation capacities, the findings from Hong Kong resonate globally—highlighting the necessity of empowering educators who are instrumental in translating policy visions into classroom realities.

Ultimately, this investigation not only diagnoses the impediments to effective STEM teaching in early childhood classrooms but also offers a blueprint for transformative action. Through culturally sensitive professional development, resource localization, and systemic flexibility, it charts a path toward more equitable and impactful STEM education that harnesses the full potential of women teachers from diverse ethnic backgrounds.

Subject of Research: People

Article Title: The Complex Context of STEM Teaching for Female, Ethnically Diverse Preschool Teachers in Hong Kong: A Concerns-Based Adoption Model

News Publication Date: 9-May-2025

Web References: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20965311251322184

References: Wang, C., Yang, W., & Bautista, A. (2025). The Complex Context of STEM Teaching for Female, Ethnically Diverse Preschool Teachers in Hong Kong: A Concerns-Based Adoption Model. ECNU Review of Education. https://doi.org/10.1177/20965311251322184

Image Credits: Combat Capabilities Development Command from Openverse

Keywords: Education; Science education; Science teaching; Science faculty; Educational assessment; Educational attainment; Educational levels; Science careers; Teaching; Educational methods; Education technology; Educational facilities; Educational programs; Students; Science communication; Education research